


Freaky Friday

by weeping00willow



Category: Jake and Amir
Genre: Bodyswap, Humor, M/M, Romantic Comedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-02
Updated: 2013-12-02
Packaged: 2018-01-03 06:16:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1067060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weeping00willow/pseuds/weeping00willow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>That one time Jake and Amir switched bodies and learned a little more about each other and themselves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Freaky Friday

Something really bright and uncomfortable is pricking at his eyelids, trying to slink behind them to the swollen globes underneath. Oh, fuck, Jake groans internally when he tries to turn away from the offending light and promptly gets hit by one of the worst headaches he's ever experienced in his life. And that's quite the accomplishment, if his ample history of hangovers is anything to go by. What the fuck did he drink last night, anyway? A jug of kerosene? Did Rosie try to feed him his special brownies again? His head keeps pounding like a basketball bouncing on concrete and his mouth tastes like crap. He reaches blindly for the water bottle he always keeps on the nightstand for cases just like this, but he obviously misses by a mile, because something falls to the floor and crashes to pieces, making his ears reel from the painful sound. He's pretty sure he never had a lamp there, so maybe he passed out at somebody else's house. Jake doesn't even get the chance to wonder whose place it is, because his stomach chooses that exact moment to clench in pain, so he's forced to open his eyes and find the nearest toilet to throw up in. His vision is strangely blurry and his limbs feel like they're made of lead, but he chucks it up to the epic hangover and stumbles into the en-suite at the other end of the room, gropes to lift up the toilet seat and promptly blows his chunks half inside the bowl, half on the floor and, dammit, all over the front of his pants. His Monty Python patterned pajama pants? What the fuck is he wearing?

Feeling a bit less like roadkill now, after emptying his stomach, Jake shuffles to the sink and splashes some water into his mouth. Almost as an afterthought, he raises his eyes to the mirror. Looks back down. Then his brain catches up with him and does a double take. 

"What the...?"

He squints to take a better look through the fog of what he previously thought were aftereffects of the hangover. Black hair sticking out all over the place, chipmunk cheeks and scruffy beard, mimicking his expression of shock. He touches his face and feels that same stubble against his fingers.

"No," he shakes his head, forgetting all about the headache. The mirror image shakes with him.

"No!" he staggers back a step. This is a nightmare and he's gotta wake himself up right the fuck now.

"Hell no!" he tries to turn around, but his foot slips on the puddle of puke from earlier, he loses his balance and promptly falls face first into the edge of the sink. 

After all the times he's seen Amir knock himself out, Jake can't muster up any appreciation for the irony of this before everything turns to black.

***

Meanwhile, somewhere on the side of the road to Nantucket:

Amir wakes up with his face smooshed against the steering wheel of Jake's car. He blinks groggily against the sunlight, rubbing at his eyes to dissipate the last traces of a headache. 

"Where the frick are my glasses?" he wonders quietly. Then takes another look at his surroundings. "Where the frick am _I_?"

The last thing he remembers is having a fight with Jake (nothing unusual there, they always fight, it's kind of their thing, Amir likes to think of it like a sign of affection), Jake refusing to tell him where he was going for the few days he took off work, Amir failing at his ninja attempt to hide in the trunk of his car to come with, Jake being meaner than usual and throwing his ass out on the street (calling him a pathetic loser and wishing aloud to never see his face again - by the way, yeah, that hurt like a bitch, not that it's the first time he's heard it, but it still doesn't get any easier), Amir for once cutting his losses and going back to his apartment to drown his rejection in a jumbo sized bottle of pineapple spritzer Leron got him for his birthday last year and passing out somewhere along the way. So, then, what the heck is he doing sleeping on the side of the road in Jake's car? Did he steal it, stuff Jake into the trunk and go on that trip to Mexico he's always wanted? He indulges in that fantasy for a minute before he realizes that, no, that can't be it, he doesn't have his lucky sombrero with him, the one he'd paid 500 bucks on E-Bay for a couple weeks ago; there’s no chance in hell he’d go to Mexico without it. Oh, well, a dude can dream, can't he?

He glances at the rearview mirror from the corner of his eye and suddenly stops short, forgets to even breathe. A blue eye. Blue! But not just any blue, Jake's blue. He clutches the small mirror in a death grip and wrenches it out of its socket, bringing it closer to his face. Jake's face! Holy shit!

He spends a couple of minutes making faces at the mirror, poking and prodding in awe at his nose, his teeth, his eyebrows, until his vision starts to grey around the edges and he finally remembers that he needs to breathe.

Then a toothy, maniacal grin stretches across his face.

"Jake is gonna flip his shiatsu when he sees this!"

Hurriedly, he fumbles for his phone - Jake's phone - and just as he's about to dial, the thing starts ringing in his hand.

"That's weird," he mumbles, checking the caller ID. 'Mom'.

"Hey, babe!" he answers brightly, unable to wipe that broad grin off his face.

"Excuse me?" Laura asks. "Are you with Amir right now?" She says it like that explains it all.

"No, no... mom," Amir backtracks. "No Amir here, just me, Jakey!" he says with a grin, still checking himself out in the broken mirror.

"I swear, you're getting weirder every day," the woman sighs resignedly. "So where are you?"

"Huh?" Amir interjects eloquently.

"I said, where are you? You were supposed to get here hours ago. We were worried about you, you weren’t answering your phone. Did something happen?"

"No, I'm fine," he tells her, looking around the car. "I'm actually on my way right now. Just, remind me again, where am I supposed to be going?"

"Home, Nantucket, Massachusetts, the USA, planet Earth!" He can tell she's getting impatient. "Have you been drinking? Drinking and driving?" Uh-oh, now she sounds pissed.

"Who, me? Drinking and driving? No, I never drink and I never drive."

"You said you were driving right now."

"Ok, I sometimes drive."

"Ugh, just get here already," she says exasperatedly. "And you better have a good explanation for this, your father's going to give you an earful when he sees you."

"An earful of what?"

"What?" she asks.

"What what?" he asks.

"Never mind," she snaps and disconnects the call, muttering to herself about immature twenty-something-year-olds and bad influences at the workplace.

"Love you too, mom!" Amir shouts into the phone and turns the keys in the ignition, new plan forming in his mind.

As he pulls out on the road towards Nantucket, Jake's phone starts to chime again, Amir's own number flashing on the screen.

He lets it go to voicemail with a grin and bounces excitedly in his seat as he pushes the pedal to the metal.

"Now this is going to be fun!"

****

"I swear to god, Amir, if you had something to do with this, I'm gonna find your scrawny ass, kill you with my bare hands, skin you alive and then kill you again just to be sure! If you haven't watched Silence of the lambs yet, you go watch it right now, so you'll see what I'm gonna do when I get my hands on you! Answer the fucking phone!"

Jake ends the tenth voicemail sent to his own number with a snarl and throws Amir's phone angrily on the bed. He's seething, going coocoo for cocoa puffs, crawling out of his skin with rage. But it's not really his skin now, is it? And rage is certainly better, more productive than the all-encompassing fear that chokes him every time he stops to think about what's happened. He's currently possessing (or whatever the fuck this is) Amir's body, so the logical conclusion to that is that Amir must be inhabiting Jake's own body right now as well. Unless his own body is dead, and he'll be forced to spend the rest of his life wearing the face of the most obnoxious person on earth. It would be just his luck that he crashed his car last night on the way to Nantucket and this is God's idea of Purgatory. And since Jake's currently alone in his own head, then where did Amir's consciousness go? Does that mean he's dead too? Something unpleasant coils in his stomach at that and Jake squashes that morbid train of thought right out of his brain. No, they switched. That's it. Like that stupid Freaky Friday mind meld Amir pretended to do a couple of years ago when he tackled Jake to the floor at work. He just needs to find his own body and then everything will get back to normal. Shit, he's still expecting to wake up from this nightmare any time now.

The last thing Jake remembers is driving towards his parents' house after work. He was pissed, and kind of guilty for snapping at Amir earlier that evening, which in turn pissed him off even more. The fucker deserved it after all, he'd tried to sneak into his car trunk for fuck's sake, the fucking stalker. He never takes no for an answer. Jake swears he could wring the idiot's neck at times, he's so annoying. But then... but then he has to make those wounded puppy dog eyes at him and Jake ends up feeling like shit every single time. Why does he even care? Is he some kind of masochist? Yeah, that must be it, some kind of weird Stockholm syndrome. They're not even friends, Jake totally hates his guts. Except for the times he really doesn't. Dammit. He's not worried about Amir, what with those disturbingly morbid thoughts he's been having for the past hour and all, no, he just wants to know where his own body is. It's self preservation, nothing more.  
He can't even call home to ask if his folks know anything about his body's whereabouts, because all of them have blocked Amir's number after the idiot called last week to tell them Jake was dead and to make sure they brought casserole for the wake after the service, but not anything with apple or walnuts, because he's allergic to that 'shiatsu', even though Jake knows that’s bullshit.

Well, he'll just have to go to work and see if he can convince any of his workmates to lend him a car, so he can go look for Amir himself. Which is going to be a bitch since everyone at the office hates Amir and Jake's currently wearing his face. Maybe he should just steal a car and spare himself the trouble.

Anyway, he can't keep hanging around here like an idiot, he might as well get dressed and get going. Unfortunately, that's the moment Jake notices that he's still half covered in puke and it hits him that he's going to have to take a shower first.

Feeling more than a little bit disturbed at the thought of having to look at and touch Amir's naked body, even if it's him on the inside, he starts getting undressed with his eyes closed and feels his way towards the bathroom like a blind man, careful not to trip on any of the crap littering the floor. Amir's landline chooses that exact moment to start ringing and the shrill sound breaks his concentration, making him crash into the doorjamb. Amir's glasses give a silent crack and fall off his nose, while Jake lets out a string of curses, rubbing at his bruised face and knee.

On the other side of the apartment, the answering machine beeps and a guy's voice starts talking:

 _"Hey, dumbass, this is Leron, your cousin. If you're done crying yourself to sleep because of Jake and being a total pussy whipped bitch, I'm calling to give you your wake up call. So get your ass out of bed and go to work. Peace out."_ Beep.

Jake picks up Amir's glasses from the floor. The lens on the left side is cracked right down the middle.

"Shit."

He puts them on the counter and hurries inside the shower to just get it over with. What the hell, he's seen Amir naked plenty of times before, he can't get any more scarred for life than he already is, right?

He turns on the tap and lets the water pour over him as he leans against the wall and closes his eyes, trying to empty his mind at least for a few minutes. This is kind of relaxing, he admits, as he squeezes some shower gel into his palm and starts rubbing it on his chest. Just, don't think too much about it. He's just at home, minding his own business, enjoying a quiet morning without Amir breaking into his apartment out of the blue and scaring the shit out of him, just some blissful alone time in his own shower, where nobody can see him, where he can do anything he wants and doesn't have a care in the world. 

Hmm, this shower feels damn good, his skin seems even more sensitive than usual, like the hot water has woken up all his nerve endings at once. He pours more shower gel into his hands and slicks the liquid over his arms, his shoulders, his ribs. Unfamiliar fingers, unfamiliar ridges of bones and flesh. He watches them through slitted eyes. Too skinny, he's always told Amir he should eat something other than those damn chicken nuggets, too damn skinny, but it fits him, surprisingly enough. His fingers travel to the ridge of muscle above his right hip and he jumps back. Ticklish. He runs just the tips of his fingers over that patch of skin again. Oh. More than ticklish. Goosebumps rise all over his skin and he gets a little lightheaded as he skims the contours of the vee of taut flesh under his belly button. His fingers meet with rough hair and almost of their own accord follow the narrow trail down, down to where the hair gets even thicker and coarse. Just a little further, Jake bites his lip to stop the moan that's threatening to rise from his throat. And that quick jolt of pain makes him suddenly open his eyes and realize what he's actually doing.

"What the fuck!" he squeals in an embarrassingly high pitch, and it's Amir's voice reverberating across the bathroom walls, Amir's chest rising and falling and desperately out of breath, Amir's hands frozen and shaking on his belly, but Jake's eyes taking it in, Jake's mind pulling out a blank as he looks down at the hard on reaching out heavily from between his legs. So foreign, so alien to him, he's never looked at another guy's dick before, but he can feel it pulsing to the rhythm of his heart, Amir's heart, and still, inexplicably, his own. He's shaking from head to toe, like this is some kind of trespassing he should never have indulged, forbidden and laced with guilt and denial. He knows he should just close his eyes and close his mind, erase the last minutes from his brain and never think about this again. But somewhere along the way he must have gone mad, must have lost all traces of reason, because instead he lets his fingers close that final inch and grabs what he can feel there like a lifeline, like this simple motion can bring him the answer he needs. His hand doesn't stop shaking, just like the rest of him, and he can't tell whether it's from pleasure or fear, and it's not only his flesh, the unfamiliar flesh of the too familiar man he's inhabiting, it is himself that's shaking, threatening to crumble into a thousand pieces and he just can't. fucking. look. away. He keeps his eyes rooted to the rhythmic motion of his hand, fascinated with how obscenely the hardened flesh peeks out from the circle of his fingers. Waves upon waves of pleasure zing across his skin, building and building until he can't take it anymore, so he finally turns his head to the side and sinks his teeth hard into his upper arm, right where the muscle bulges with the effort of holding himself up, and then he comes hard, harder than he can ever remember, feeling the taste of unfamiliar skin on his tongue.

"What the fuck just happened?" he groans brokenly, splayed on the shower floor seconds later and failing to make either his body or his mind work again.

***

When he finally manages to get out of the shower and towel himself dry, Jake hears the tail end of another phone call being recorded on Amir's answering machine.

_"...need that software ready by tomorrow, for final testing. I know it's just a matter of crossing the tees and filling in the dots for you at this point, but you know how the boss gets about his big investments. So just call me as soon as you can, or at least send me an e-mail with the updates. Bye."_

"Huh, that was weird," Jake mutters, clinging to anything that would make him forget what happened only minutes before. He puts on the broken glasses and walks over to the closet to find something to wear. He picks some clothes and dresses himself carefully, feeling oddly protective of his borrowed body, like he wants to make up for his previous violation. He's a bit surprised that he's not freaking out more after... after... well, after. He guesses he's still in shock, or something. Better not dwell on it too much, he's got an entire list of things to freak out over already.

As he bends down to look for some shoes, the crooked glasses slip off his face and fall somewhere on the bottom of the closet. With a curse, Jake reaches out a hand to grope for them among the pile of crap stuffed at the back of the closet and just as he almost thinks he's found them, his hand bumps against some kind of box. He picks up the glasses and makes to get up, but then stops in his tracks, curiosity picking at his brain. He reaches inside again and pulls out the cardboard shoe box which feels much heavier than it looks. There's a shoe string tied around it to keep the lid in place. Jake knows he shouldn't look, it's none of his business, he's done enough damage as it is, he doesn't need to add more to his guilty conscience, but another part of him points out that this is quid pro quo. Amir's been stalking him for years and invading his privacy, so it's only fair that Jake learn a couple of his secrets for a change. For all the guy can't seem to ever shut up, he doesn't say much about himself, and when he does let something slip, it's usually either very sad or just plain disturbing. And probably bullshit, Jake can never tell. So this is his chance. Quid pro quo. Aw, fuck it. He unties the shoelace and peels the lid off quickly, before he loses his nerve.

Inside, he finds a bunch of papers, notes, photographs of Amir with people Jake doesn' t recognize but guesses are his relatives at bar mitzvahs and other mildly formal events. He picks one of them up. A small boy, probably six or seven-ish, flanked by two older boys and two adults in a very rehearsed-looking pose. The two grown-ups are smiling at the camera, the father laying a hand on the boy's shoulder. But the boy is looking down, hands clenched together and face devoid of all expression. He seems to be cringing away from his father's hand and Jake feels a frisson of uneasiness go through his chest at that. He quickly picks up another photo, this one with an older Amir wearing a graduation toga and cap and looking so damn nerdy and no, not at all cute, Jake mentally berates himself, receiving his high school diploma on a stage. The next one is a photo of him clearly taken without his knowledge by someone else while he's crouching over some kind of electronic gizmo and taking it apart, a pleased and excited smile on his face. There are a lot of pictures of him and his cousins, Leron and Limford, pulling all kinds of crazy stunts, some snapshots of his two brothers, but no other photos of his parents and no photos of any of his friends. Jake's heart clenches a bit when he realizes that he most likely didn't have any friends to take pictures with. There are four thick leather journals tucked inside the box, but when Jake tries to read the first page of one, he sees that they're all written in Hebrew. At the bottom of the box he finally finds a graduation diploma from MIT, dated seven years ago, the name Amir Valerie Blumenfeld staring unerringly at him from beneath a Magna Cum Laude inscription.

"Holy crap!"

Jake can't believe his eyes. Amir, who can't even do basic math, graduated fucking MIT? What the hell? Jake's always known on some level that Amir isn't as stupid as he likes to make people think he is, but, MIT? Seriously? 

Under that, he finds a weird letter from some Professor Harding with the English Literature Department header at the top of the page. It's only two lines long and confusing as hell. 

_"You can be anyone you want to be. Choose wisely, kid, and good luck."_

"What the hell is going on here?" 

***

That went pretty well, Amir thinks to himself. He can totally impersonate Jake, he's a bonafide Helena Bonham Carter, he's got them eating out of the palm of his hand. Well, he might have crashed through the front door running from the neighbor's dog and yelled 'Wazzup, bitches!', at which Jake's mother asked him again if he was drunk or high and his father made him do that drivers' sobriety test where he had to stand on one leg and touch his nose with his finger, which he was never able to do before without getting a nosebleed, but Jake's genes have been really kind to him indeed, this new body managed to do it just fine. And then he tried so hard, he really did, to have a normal lunch conversation and not mention how awesome it was to take a dump using someone else's body (seriously, it was frigging epic when he sat down and took his first shit out of Jake's ass, it was like learning all the secrets of the universe while eating a quarter ton of chicken nuggets and getting to punch Oprah in the face at the same time. It's so much better than when he craps in his own body; the buildup, and then the release and then that floating sensation like he was a rubber balloon drifting in the wind, he swears he actually heard birds singing right then. Or it might have been the open window. Anyway. He's going to write a fucking sonnet to Jake's asshole, for real. And publish it online, and copyright it for good measure so that Mark Fuckerberg won't be able to get his greedy hands on it. Yeah, Amir is a pimp and a philosopher, and that's the only way to roll). And he definitely refrained from commenting on Laura's obvious boob job - which, by the way, looks awesome, Jake's dad is one lucky bastard if he gets to fuck those fake titties every night - or boxing Micah's ears in, or peeing on the couch, or doing the hundred other things he was itching to do. Hey, he can be a ninja when he really wants to. He just listened to them going on and on about their jobs and their house and their car and aunt Lucia's fifth husband, then answered their questions about Jake's latest hits ( because there's nothing about Jake Amir doesn't know, heck, he keeps a ledger with every outfit Jake has ever worn for the last five years and another one documenting how much time he spends in the bathroom every time he goes to take a leak, and, yes, Amir can predict with utmost certainty when Jake needs to go, an useful skill that allows him to hide with his stopwatch in a neighboring stall before Jake even thinks about getting up from his desk). Although, maybe he should have kept quiet about pushing his last girlfriend in front of a bus. But, hey, Amir is still kinda pissed about that, so, suck it up, Jakey, tit for tat. 

He finally managed to get a little time to himself about an hour ago, and he's been spending it locked up in Jake's room ever since, bare ass naked and looking at himself in the mirror from every angle. He's never seen anything more beautiful, more perfectly sculpted and breathtaking in all his life. He avoids looking at the eyes, though, the only part of this foreign body he can see his real self in. He doesn't want to taint this perfect image with any glimpse of ' Amir'. It's kind of sad that the only way to become part of such beauty is by stealing it, by usurping it like a thief in the night, and, yeah, he may be a master of deflection, but even he can' t ignore the dozen phone calls received from his own number on Jake's phone. Just a little more time, that's all he's asking for, just a few more hours to contemplate what he can never have and never be, and then he'll give it all back gladly. He'll be selfish just a little longer. With the utmost reverence, he dresses himself and pulls out the phone. Twenty-two lost calls and half as many voicemails in his inbox. Not going to deal with that right now. Instead, he switches on the camera and turns the lens towards himself. 

"Amir," he begins, trying to mimic Jake's diction as best as he can. "I just wanted to let you know that, despite the things I say sometimes when I get mad, I really do appreciate and respect you as my best friend. I think you're a good person and you are worth more than you give yourself credit for. You're smart and funny and dependable, and even though you act like a goof sometimes, I know deep down you're a decent human being. Never stop being part of my life. Best friends forever."

And then he cuts the recording off, before he starts to cry like a pussy, and sends it quickly to one of his e-mail accounts, deleting the original file from Jake's phone.

He'll keep it for a rainy day. And maybe if he gets drunk enough, he might actually believe it too.

***

By the time Jake finishes ransacking Amir's apartment, looking for more evidence (of what exactly, he couldn't say. Of lying, maybe? Of betrayal? He just feels this big razorblade ball of discontent gnawing at him from the inside and he can't for the life of him explain why), the place looks like it's just been hit by Hurricane Catrina's older, grumpier sister. Which is a feat in and of itself, since the place looked like crap to begin with. All he's managed to dig up are things he would have expected to find in Amir's home anyway. Scrapbooks of badly photoshopped pictures of Amir and himself, half-assed poems and scripts, journals keeping track of how many times Jake compliments Amir during the day or the exact dates and duration of all their dinner 'dates', heaps of research on Jake's past, like school records, hospital bills, family trees, and, seriously, half of these things look pretty illegal for somebody to just randomly have in their house, how the fuck did Amir get a hold of them? Then again, the guy did graduate fucking MIT, so he could have hacked into the county records or something. Jeez, the pages are even underlined with colored markers and have annotations on the side. Strange that the overall creepiness of that doesn't half bother him as much as the fact that Amir is apparently a very skilled hacker who, let's not forget, graduated fucking MIT! Where does the douchebag even get off lying to Jake like that? Why didn't he say anything? Gullies for life and all that jazz, but not where it matters, apparently. So Jake isn't even worth the truth? What else has he been lied to about? And, no, it doesn't matter that Jake never asked, that he assumed right off the bat some obviously demeaning facts about Amir that turned out to be wrong, the asshole should have trusted him enough to tell him from the start. Not that Jake cares or anything like that. He doesn't want to know every little thing about Amir, they're not even friends. Except for the fact that they kind of are and it kind of hurts to be left out of the loop like that. And, nope, Jake's not even the least bit jealous that his psychopathic stalker graduated a top notch college while he himself dropped out and barely managed to make ends meet until he lucked out and found his current job. He's not even a tiny bit insecure about that, and he'll punch whoever says different right in the face. 

Back to the task at hand... He's going to have to come back and burn these frigging scrapbooks when he has the time (especially that one tallying how many times he takes a piss during the day, seriously, that is just... hell no!), right after he manages to find Amir and kick the shit out of him for being a liar and a traitor who weaseled his way into Jake's life and made himself indispensable only to go around and break his fucking heart. And fuck, Jake didn't just think that! He sure as hell did not. Alright, time to steal that fucking car and go a-huntin'.

He grabs Amir's phone from where he left it on the bed, dimly registering that there are a few missed calls flashing on the screen, but since none of them are from Amir, he doesn't pay them any mind, he's on a mission and he's already wasted enough time.

Just as he yanks the door open to go out, he's knocked back inside the apartment by a very pissed off Limford who grabs him by the lapels of his shirt.

"What the fuck?" He sputters, trying to push the asshole off him, but he won't budge.

"I've left you a dozen messages, asswipe. Why aren't you picking up your phone?" Limford shakes him.

"I don't have time for this, Limford, get the fuck out of my house." The last thing Jake needs is to deal with Amir's idiot cousin right now.

"You don't have time for this?" the guy bristles. "Your mom's in the fucking hospital and you don't have time to pick up the phone and see if she's alright?"

"What?" Jake stops struggling.

"She's been in a car accident this morning, douchebag, and she's been asking for you. And since you're clearly not at work and you’re just sitting around your apartment with your dick in your hand, the least you could do is drop by the hospital and talk to the woman who gave you birth and who almost died today, if it's not too inconvenient for you."

"Well, shit, man, I'm sorry, I didn't know," Jake babbles, clearly out of his depth and forgetting his own issues for a bit. "Can you give me a lift to the hospital?" It's Amir's mom, for fuck's sake, and even though Jake's never met her, he should at least make sure she's okay before he leaves.

"Is this your idea of a joke?" Limford squints at him doubtfully.

"Just give me a fucking lift jackass," Jake snaps. "You said she's asking for me and I don't own a fucking car, so what is your problem?"

Limford waits quietly for a couple of beats, then nods with a half smile towards the door.

"Alright. After you."

Jake goes for the door handle and that's the last thing he sees before something hard slams into the back of his head and knocks him unconscious for the second time that day. Oh, great, here we go again...

***

His head is fucking killing him, Jake thinks as he crawls his way towards consciousness a few minutes later. There's also a very strong feeling of deja-vu which he would've loved to analyze further if, oh yeah, his head didn't hurt like a sonofabitch at the moment. Groggily, he tries to raise a hand to rub at the back of his head where he can feel a pulsating ball of agony radiating down his spine, but somehow he can't seem to be able to move at all. Suddenly panicked, he opens his eyes and gets a full on view of Amir's idiot cousins, Limford and Leron, pointing a lamp straight at his face and hovering over his head with kitchen utensils in their hands. Oh, and Jake is currently tied to a chair with duct tape around his ankles and wrists, but, hey, what's a little cut-off circulation compared to the blinding pain and the concussion, right?

"Alright, who the hell are you and what have you done with my cousin?" Limford cuts to the chase, brandishing a frying pan to show that he means business.

"What are you talking about?" Jake mutters. "Let me go."

"Like that's gonna work on us, you filthy alien bodysnatcher thing," Leron scoffs. 

"You've got three seconds to start talking, or else we're gonna use The Probe!" Limford threatens and pushes a kitchen mixer under Jake's nose.

"I don't know what you're talking about, dude," Jake tries to play it cool.

"Alright then," Limford nods. "Leron, take his pants off."

"Aargh! Get away from me!" Jake yells and starts thrashing against the chair.

"Who the fuck are you?" Limford resumes his interrogation. "And where is my cousin?"

"I'm Jake, alright? I'm Jake!" he finally decides to come clean. "I woke up today and I was in Amir's body, I have no idea how or why and I don't know where he is. I was gonna go out and look for him when you two jackasses knocked me out. Just get that thing away from me, jeez."

"You think he's telling the truth?" Leron asks, swinging the mixer back and forth under Jake's uneasy gaze.

"Hmm. Stranger things have happened," Limford muses.

"Are you fucking kidding me?" Jake gapes at him. "What else could you have possibly seen that's stranger than this?"

"I once saw a Korean chick eat a rattle snake and piss it back out through her vagina," Leron adds helpfully.

"First off, eww," Jake twists his mouth in disgust. "Second off, you're an idiot."

"Yup, that's him alright," Limford nods decidedly.

"What? How can you tell?" Leron asks.

"Because nobody else is that much of a bitch," Limford answers with a grin.

"Hey!" Jake pipes up, insulted.

"Does that mean I can't probe him anymore?" Leron looks wistfully at the mixer.

"No! No probing! Nuh uh!" Jake scoots back in his chair.

"Maybe later," Limford waves it off and turns back to Jake. "Now, start from the beginning."

And Jake tells him everything he knows, only leaving out the part about jerking himself off in the shower using his best friend's dick. Yeah. Definitely not going there.

After he's finished, Limford just looks at him crookedly for a few seconds in silence, then says:

"So, let me get this straight, you wake up, realize you've switched bodies with another person, and instead of going after Amir straight away, you start rifling through his stuff?"

"Seriously?" Jake sighs. "Out of everything I've told you, that's the thing that gets your attention?"

"Well, yeah, that's kind of a douchy thing to do to your best friend, isn't it? Betraying his trust like that," the guy says.

"Betraying his trust?" Jake shouts. "He stalks me all the time, breaks into my house, videotapes me while I'm showering, apparently hacks into classified federal records to retrace my family tree and he never once tells me a thing about himself. I broke his trust? What about him breaking my trust, huh? Straight up lying about who he really is. Is that something that friends do? Is it?"

"Now listen to me, Hurwitz," Limford gets all up in his face. "I never liked you. In fact, I think you're a self absorbed dick and a bully. I've lost count of how many times my cousin's cried on my shoulder because of something you said or did to him. Frankly, I don't even know what Amir sees in you. You're a shitty friend, you stole his girlfriend, you took off to California without even saying goodbye, you constantly belittle him in front of other people and you make him feel like shit every single day. And still he cares about you and calls you his friend. He would do anything for you, and you exploit that without any shame, but when push comes to shove, you always let him down. You don't have the right to call Amir out on anything, least of all on lack of trust. Trust is something that you have to earn. And something that clearly you don't deserve."

Well, when he puts it like that... Actually, Jake realizes, he can't argue with it. He is a shitty friend. Everything Limford just told him is true, and put into perspective like that, Jake's own arguments all sound petty and unfair. How the hell did he never stop to think for a moment what things looked like from the other side of the fence?

But Limford's clearly not done yet, because he goes on:

"So what's the first thing that went through your head when you saw that diploma, huh? That Amir's actually two different people? That the way he behaves himself in public is just an act, and he's actually a normal guy playing the part of a crazy person just to get attention? Well, tough luck, Hurwitz. What you see is what you get. This is who Amir Blumenfeld really is: crazy smart and batshit crazy, a sociopath and a lunatic, and a thousand times braver that you will ever be, because he doesn't give a shit about what people think and always fights for what he believes in. And ne never, ever loses hope. Even when it turns against him and rips him apart, he will hang on to the thing he believes in. And for the past five years, in case you didn't get the memo, that was you. So you should be kissing his ass right now, Hurwitz, you ungrateful, selfish little prick."

"He poisoned my food!" Jake tries to argue. "He broke my arm. He stabbed me in the spleen. He almost got me arrested four times. He steals my stuff and hits on my mother and breaks into my house in the middle of the night. He's racist and obnoxious and creepy and he never shuts up. He drives me fucking crazy."

"Then what are you still doing here?" Leron asks.

"What?" Jake blinks.

"Why did you come back from California?" Limford elaborates. " Why didn't you press charges or get a restraining order or get him fired from his job? If he's that much of a pain in your ass, why didn't you just cut him loose once and for all?"

And that's the crux of the problem right there, Jake thinks. Because he honestly doesn't know. Life with Amir Blumenfeld is a living hell, but life without him is equally inconceivable, if not more.

"You need to figure out what the hell it is you want, man," Limford tells him. "Because the way you're acting now, you're just hurting my cousin, and we’re not gonna stand for it. Unlike those deadbeat parents of his, Leron and I actually give a fuck what happens to Amir. Just keep that in mind."

He throws the frying pan down on a table and nods to his cousin:

"Leron, cut him free. We've got stuff to do."

A minute later, Jake is rubbing his sore wrists and looking shiftily for something to say in order to break the tense silence.

"So, how did you guys realize I wasn't Amir?"

"Amir would never in a million years have agreed to go see his mother, even in the hospital," Limford smirks.

"Oh, crap, about that," Jake remembers. "Is she alright?"

"Meh, she's fine," Limford scoffs. "Just a sprained ankle."

"Then why were you freaking out like that when you first came here and thought I was Amir?"

"I keep trying to convince the stupid ass to go talk to her, but I might as well be shouting at thin air. That, and I like to keep him on his toes."

"Do I detect a double standard there, your holier-than-thou-ness?" Jake asks ironically. 

"Oh, shut the fuck up," Limford scoffs. "I've still got that probe and I'm not afraid to use it."

***

It's five o'clock in the afternoon by the time Amir gets almost thrown out of Jake's parents' house.

"No offense, honey, but you're way too wired. Go out, meet some of your friends and come back later when you've cooled off, okay?"

Laura looks worried about him, for some reason. Amir’s beginning to suspect he hasn't been doing such a great job impersonating Jake after all. Don't get him wrong, he likes Jake's family, even better than his own, they make him feel like he belongs, but it just gets so boring in the end he feels like climbing up the walls. Amir's never been one to just blend in and go with the flow, he's realized early on in life that he's better off just doing his own thing and having fun with it, and even though more often than not he pisses people off, at least he can pride himself on the fact that he's never been a sheep. He doesn't like people and people don't like him, what-the-fuck-ever. The only people in his life he gives a shit about think he's a fuck up already, so he doesn't really have anything to lose, right? Still, sometimes he wonders. Wonders what it's like to have a 'normal' life, with 'normal' friends and 'normal' parents who actually like him and are proud of him. That he gets to experience that by being 'Jake' for a little while is the best gift of all, so he's damn well going to enjoy it while it lasts.

He meets up with Jake's high school buddies outside a bar downtown. They look happy to see him, start asking him about the website, about life in New York and other boring shiatsu like that. Amir does his best to answer like a 'normal' person, and even though he doesn't give a flaming fart, he asks them about their lives too. It's safer to keep the topic off himself anyway. Not surprisingly, these guys' lives are boring as hell. After they finished high school, they never did manage to find decent jobs, and he can see they're secretly holding a grudge against Jake for being the one of them who made it to the big city and out of his parents' home, especially since he dropped out of college. Well, fuckers, Jake is way cooler than you, no surprise there, so get over it. Why is Jake even friends with these losers anyway?

"So, Jake, how did you manage to lose the stalker?" Steve, one of the guys, asks out of the blue.

"Huh?" Amir breaks out of his mental rendition of the Macarena. Truth be told, he stopped listening to their ramblings ages ago, not that anybody even noticed, self-absorbed pricks.

"Yeah, man, that creepy guy from work, Amir, that kept following you around last time you came here," Chris helpfully supplies.

"Guess I gave him the slip this time, whatever," Amir says, uncomfortable talking about himself in the third person.

"Dude, that guy was a total freak!" Steve goes on. "Asking for chicken nuggets at a grill bar."

"And telling those fucked up stories about him and his cousin planking at a funeral," Jim pipes in.

"And telling everyone how he sneaks into your apartment and videotapes you while you’re taking a shit," Chris adds. "What a complete psycho."

"Seriously, man, you should get a restraining order against him or something," Steve insists. "That shit is really fucked up."

"I'm still waiting to hear from my lawyer about that," Amir deflects, laughing uncomfortably.

"I don't even know how freaks like that are allowed to function in society," Jim cackles. "Just, throw'em off the top of a building or whatever, it would make the world a better place."

"Yeah, I mean, if that guy followed me around like a total creep, I'd kick the shit out of him. And saying he was your best friend? For real? Like you'd ever be friends with a retard like him."

"Guess not," Amir laughs it off, pretending to signal the waitress for another drink and suddenly regretting having come here in the first place.

The guys keep laughing without noticing a thing, until, suddenly, they all stop to look at the group of people that have just walked in.

"Aw, fuck, just what we needed," Chris mutters. "Robbie and his asshole brigade."

"As in Robbie McGuinness? Kumel's friend?" Amir asks without turning around. He can still remember the whole debacle with Jake's deadbeat older brother and the embarrassing stories he liked to tell everyone at the office.

"Yeah, in the flesh," Jim fumbles for his wallet. "Let's get out of here before they spot us. Don't want a repeat of last time..."

"Oh, shit, they're coming this way," Chris lets his head hang, trying to ignore them.

"Wazzup, losers?" a booming voice calls out from behind and Amir turns to see three thugs, for lack of a better description, sneering down at them. They all seem to be about five years older than Jake and one of them has his arm around a slutty redhead that looks like she's had a few drinks too many. Ironic, since they only just walked into the bar.

"Oh, look at what the cat dragged in, boys. It's Jakey, the Curious Cunt!" Robbie grins. "Whatcha doing here, Hurwitz? Come crawling back under your mother's skirts because the city life is too hard for ya?"

The other two start laughing on cue like the mindless sheep they are.

"Come on, guys, we're just trying to have a drink, leave us alone," Steve tries to reason with them.

"You hear that, Donnie?" the asshole cackles to one of his sidekicks. "The little cunts want us to leave them alone. Buy us all drinks for the rest of the night and we might consider it."

When he sees Steve reach for his wallet, Amir bristles on the spot:

"What the fuck? You're just gonna do what they tell you like a little bitch?"

"Shut the fuck up, man," Jim elbows him in the side.

"What was that?" Robbie the Dick pipes up. "Did I just hear Curious Jakey grow some balls? Maybe you want to put your money where your mouth is, Hurwitz."

"Look, guys, we don't want any trouble, just take this and leave us alone," Steve holds out a few tenners out to the thugs.

"The hell we will," Robbie takes a step forward. "I wanna hear what this loser has to say," he points at Amir. "Come on, Jakey, show me what you got. Or are you too much of a pussy and a momma's boy to do that? No wonder your brother can't stand the sight of you, you're nothing but a loser and a disgrace."

And that's it! That is the last straw. If this were a dig at Amir himself, he might let it slide, he's done that all his life, but these douchebags are insulting Jake, and in Amir's book, that might as well be a capital offense. He gets up from his chair and right into the stupid jerk's face.

"Do you know what’s worse than an ass crack?" he looks Robbie up and down. “And ass crack with two dingleberry cupcakes on the side,” and he glances at the other two dipshits making up the three-star McGuinness constellation.

“Hey, who are you calling a cupcake?” the knackered girl on Donnie’s arm pipes up.

“Don’t worry, babe, I wasn’t talking about you,” Amir waves her off. 

He can practically see a vein popping up on the thug's forehead as he clenches his fists. The rest of the bar has fallen quiet around them, but they might as well be on the other side of the moon for all that Amir cares, he's on a roll. He's doing this for Jake as well as himself and it's been a long time coming.

"Tonight is your lucky night, Rob-on-the-cob," he smiles and takes out Jake’s wallet. “No need to take Steve up on his offer, your first cockmeat sandwich is on me,” and he holds out a five dollar bill under Robbie’s nose.

He sees the fist coming straight at his face, and he ducks quickly to one side. There's chaos after that. Jake's friends scrambling up from their chairs to help, the bartender yelling at them to get out, a girl screaming, patrons fleeing out of their way, the three thugs coming at them with punches and Amir smashing a bottle against Robbie's stupid face. Somewhere along the way, Jake's friends realizing that there's more of them than there are of Robbie's gang and charging head on, tables being upended and chairs flying through the air. Amir uses Jake's height and strength to punch and kick and generally go apeshit on the fuckers and he's laughing out loud even as he feels blood dripping into his left eye, he's never felt this good in his entire life.

He doesn't find it in himself to care when the police show up a few minutes later and stuff them all, kit and caboodle into the van and they drive off to spend the rest of the night in jail. Sure, he's got a couple bruised ribs, bleeding nose and mouth, concussion, heaps of bruises and aches and that cut on his arm where a stray broken bottle nicked him is gonna need some stitches soon before he bleeds out, but the other three fuckers are way worse off, so he counts it as a win, and anything else can just tally up as honorary donations to Amir Blumenfeld's Foundation for Not Giving A Fuck. 

Yeah, life is good indeed.

***

"Pull over," Leron demands from the backseat.

"No," Limford tells him and focuses doggedly on the road ahead.

"I gotta take a shit, like, right now," his cousin insists.

"Why didn't you just take a shit before we left?" Leron asks impatiently.

"Because I didn't need to shit then, dickface," Leron snaps. "Now pull the fuck over before I go number two all over your precious leather seats." Which he emphasizes by letting rip a loud crackling fart.

"Jesus fucking Christ!" Jake gags in disgust and hurries to open his window. This is like Amir squared, for fuck's sake. Fucking Blumenfeld clan. If he didn't need a ride to Nantucket so bad, he wouldn't be in this mess right now. Speaking of which, it's almost six o'clock in the afternoon, if they keep stopping for all kinds of stupid reasons, they're never going to catch the last ferry out.

"Alright, there's a gas station right there," Limford pulls over. "Make it quick."

Leron bursts out of the car and starts running towards the building like a half demented chimpanzee on crack. Jake just takes a deep breath to calm the headache that he feels growing behind his eyes. He's got a mission, he needs to find Amir and his own body and see about fixing this whole mess (and, loathe as he may be to admit, he's worried as fuck that Amir hasn't been returning any of his calls). He can't afford to lose it right now, even though his hands are just itching to whack Limford over the head with something, let him see how pleasant that whole experience is for himself, jack their car and just go on his merry way, and to hell with these two fuckers.

When almost fifteen minutes later they're still waiting in the car and there's still no sign of Leron, Jake finally snaps.

"What the hell is taking him so long?" 

Limford just watches Jake with that devious calculating look of his that never fails to set his teeth on edge.

"What?" he snaps at the guy.

"You look like an idiot," Limford points at his broken glasses.

"Well, gee, thank you for that helpful remark. So are you gonna go look for your stupid cousin or not?"

"Nope."

"Well, fuck it," Jake opens the door and bolts out of the car. These two jackasses are pissing him the fuck off.

Instead of going straight for the tire iron like he's itching to do, Jake stalks angrily towards the gas station. If Leron's not done shitting by now, he's just gonna drag him pants down back to the car, he's fed up with this.

But when he opens the door and is greeted by a loud crash and a string of shouted profanities from inside, Jake realizes that, yes, in case he was wondering, his day _can_ get even crappier than it already is.

The gas station clerk, a chubby middle aged guy, is currently chasing Leron around the snack shelves, brandishing a baseball bat and yelling: "Come back here, motherfucker! I'm gonna kick your ass!"

The guy swings his bat again, knocking a row of kool aid bottles off a shelf and barely missing Leron's head, who just laughs like an idiot and ducks behind the vending machine near the door.

"What's going on here?" Jake moves in front of the raving guy, trying to block his path. The last thing he needs right now is to drag Leron's heavy ass back to the car if he gets knocked out; he doubts he's going to get any help from the other Blumenfeld marvel waiting outside.

"Let me at him!" apeshit guy spits out and tries to push past him, but Jake grabs him by the shoulders and tries to at least distract him while Leron manages to get out.

"Calm down, sir, just tell me what happened."

"What happened?" the clerk sputters. "This fucking douchebag walks in, knocks over a whole shelf at the back of the room, and while I go clean it up, he takes a shit all over my cash register, that's what! Now get the fuck out of my way!"

"Shoulda seen your face, man!" Leron is just standing there by the vending machine laughing his ass off, not even trying to escape.

"Get the fuck out of here, Leron!" Jake yells over his shoulder trying to hold the clerk back.

"Ah, so you're friends with this asshole, huh?" the man turns his attention to Jake. "Maybe I'll just kick your ass instead."

Oh, shit, Jake curses himself as he dodges the swinging bat. This is the last time he's ever going to play the good Samaritan again, he should've just let the stupid fucker get his own ass kicked.

"A little help here?" Jake squeaks as he ducks from another swipe of the bat.

"Sure thing, 'cuz'," Leron pockets his phone (the stupid fucker was filming him! Of all the nerve! Jake is gonna wring his fucking neck) and lunges forward, crushing into the man's back. They tumble forward in a heap and the clerk lands face first into the pile of shit smeared all over the cash register.

There's a moment of silence, the three of them frozen in shock, then, at the same time, the guy starts sputtering and coughing and Leron starts cackling like a madman and Jake can't fucking believe this is his life, it's just so fucking insane and he can't help the wheezing laughter that's bubbling from his own chest over and over until there are tears flowing down his face.

Uh oh, Jake realizes through his outburst of mirth, the guy looks really pissed now that he managed to get some of the shit out of his eyes and he's coming right at them with the bat. So he grabs Leron's arm and yanks him out the door and they hightail it to the car as fast as they can, Shitface stumbling and screaming bloody murder in their wake.

"The fuck did you do?" Limford squawks as they barrel into the car.

"Go, go, go!" Jake shouts.

"Fuuuck!" Leron scrambles to turn the ignition on and peel out of the parking lot, but not before Shitface bashes their rear window in with his bat.

"You owe me a fucking window, Jake!" Limford growls when they're safely speeding down the road again.

"Me?" Jake bristles. "Why me? This is all your cousin's fault!" And the window isn't even broken, just cracked a bit.

"'Cause you're the one with a paycheck, dumbass," Limford says. "Try to keep up."

"I hate you guys so much," Jake sighs resignedly and prays that he’ll survive the rest of this road trip from hell.

***

Amir squeezes and flexes his fist, engrossed in the play of muscle and tendon beneath Jake's skin. The butterfly tattooed on his forearm almost seems like it's ready to take flight. Amir brushes his lips against it, closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. The smell of Jake's skin, even though overlayed by iodine and a faint trace of blood , still manages to stir something fluttery in the pit of his stomach, not unlike those same butterfly wings he was thinking about before. He wishes he could fly too, just like them. If he had wings, Amir would fly straight into the sun.

"Dude, what are you doing?" Chris breaks him out of his trance.

He looks around the prison cell at the four other guys, Jake's buddies, all of them looking like a freak show with their faces bruised and bloodied to various degrees, and for the life of him, Amir doesn't get what Jake sees in these guys.

"Were you just French kissing your hand?" Chris asks incredulously.

"This isn't my hand, dumbass," Amir snorts. After all, it's the truth.

"Seriously, what did that nurse give you? I want some of that shit," Jim butts in.

"Nah, man, leave him to it," Steve waves a hand. "After what he did tonight, he can damn well French kiss his butthole if that's what he wants."

"Dude, I've never seen you stand up to anyone like that," Jim says. "Gotta say, this new FTW attitude suits you."

"Well, I guess that was pretty chill," Amir admits. "Never knew bashing people's faces in was so much fun. They never taught me that in kung-fu class…"

"Yeah, those fuckers deserved it," Chris agrees. "But, still, I'm curious. What brought this on?"

"Yeah, man," Steve explains. "They've been bullying you since kindergarten and you never did anything to stop them."

"Remember that time in junior high, when Kumel put laxatives in your lunch and then Robbie's gang padlocked all the bathrooms in the school and by the time you got home you shat your pants?" 

"Or that time they stole your clothes at baseball practice and spray painted them pink and wrote 'fag' and 'pussy' on your locker because Kumel told them you had posters of Justin Timberlake up on your bedroom wall?"

"Or that time they roped that smokeshow Stacy Hoover into asking you on a fake date and when you showed up with flowers at her house, you found her on the living room couch sucking Robbie’s dick?"

"And every single time you just laughed it off and never said one bad thing about Kumel or his deadbeat friends. It's like you idolized them or something," Chris wrinkles his nose.

"You always wanted to blend in with them, even when they were bullying the shit out of you," Jim scoffs.

"Well, let’s just say my eyes are wide open now,” Amir decrees. “Things are gonna change.”

Amir is beginning to see more clearly than he'd have ever imagined where Jake's self-esteem issues are coming from. The thought of Kumel and those idiots persecuting his Jakey for years like that makes him want to track them all down and chop their balls off in their sleep. Nobody insults his Jakey and gets away with it.

Amir remembers the first time he met Jake, years ago, when the other man was just an intern at the website, trying to find his footing in the new place. Amir was on his way to Ricky's office to drop off the latest search engine update (he rarely made an appearance at the office back then, he usually worked from home, like he still does now, and nobody even knew what his job was, let alone that his paycheck was easily three times bigger than any of theirs. They just knew him as the obnoxious nerdy Jew who pissed everyone off and Amir liked to keep it that way. Only Ricky knew the true value of his work and catered to his every whim because he knew damn well his website would have crashed and burned ages ago if it hadn't been for Amir's technical genius). So, as he was walking to the boss' office, Amir suddenly saw this fresh new face, nervous and playing it up so hard to try and make a good impression, not for one second realizing that he shone so bright already he didn't need to worry, just be himself. But Amir saw that light, and knew right then and there that he never wanted to look away. So he marched right into Ricky's office and told him - nope, not even asked, just straight up announced - that the desk across from Jake Hurwitz would be his from then on. And that's all she wrote. 

"We just want you to be yourself, Jake, that's all," Chris has apparently been saying while Amir was zoned out. 

"Yeah, dude, you do you, and fuck what everyone else thinks," Steve insists.

…And maybe Amir can kinda see why Jake likes these guys after all.

Just as he opens his mouth to respond, Amir suddenly hears the loud clang of the cell block door being opened and, sure enough, one of the cops saunters in front of their cell.

"Get up, you idiots, this is your lucky day," the cop says, unlocking the barred door.

"Awesome," Jim jumps up from the bench. "Who posted bail?"

"Nobody," the cop answers. "The three guys you put into the hospital don't want to press charges and since the witnesses say that they provoked you and this isn't their first offence, the chief decided to let you go."

And apparently the chief is also Steve's uncle, but who's complaining, right?

"W-w-w-w-wait!" Amir blurts out. "What about my phone call?"

"I just said you're free to go," the cop squints at him incredulously. "The hell do you need a phone call for?"

"Because I want. to. call. someone, d'oh," Amir spells it out for him.

"Just get out of here, will ya?" the cop starts to lose his patience.

"Come on, dude, you can use your own cell phone when we're out," Chris tries to drag him away, but, nope, Amir has made up his mind.

"I'm not leaving here without my phone call," he crosses his arms. "This isn't communist China, I know my rights. And you can either give me my one phone call, or I'll sue you and tell the judge you anal probed me with your salami stick for two hours straight."

"What!" the cop sputters.

"And my buddies here were eye witnesses to the whole thing, weren't you?"

Steve who's been trying to stifle his chuckles pipes up:

"Yes sir, we can definitely corroborate that."

"You little shit!" the cop tries to lunge at him, but Amir ducks out of the way as deftly as he can hyped up on painkillers and with the two bruised ribs he's got.

"Ah, aah, police brutality! Wait ‘til my lawyer hears about this!"

In the end they give him his phone call, if only to shut him up and hopefully get rid of him faster.

Amir picks up the clammy germ infested receiver, takes a deep breath for courage, and finally, for the first time since all this shitstorm began, he calls Jake.

***

"That was awesome! Can we do it again?" Limford pumps a fist into the air, splashing water into Jake's face and smearing his already cracked glasses with ocean grime.

They're all soaking wet and crouching between a shipping container and the surrounding fence in Nantucket Port, hiding from the authorities.

"That was awesome?" Jake grouses, while trying and failing to clean his glasses even though the rest of him is just as filthy. "'Cause from where I'm standing, this day couldn't get any worse."

"We made it here, didn't we?" Limford shrugs.

"You ran away from the police when they wanted to pull us over," Jake points out.

"Well, I didn't want them to catch me driving without a license for the third time this week," Limford explains.

"Somehow I don't think that's what they were stopping you for, seeing as though you were doing 80 in a residential area and taking corners like a bat out of hell while people were screaming and ducking out of your way."

"Great survival insticts, gotta give them that, but we were running late," Limford argues. "And may I remind you that was your fault to begin with? We did manage to catch the last ferry out, though."

"Yeah, after you made the patrol car crash into a ditch and almost drove straight through a shopping mall, sure," Jake scoffs. "And when we arrived at Nantucket Port and the crew wouldn't let your car off the ferry because the police had radioed in your license plate number alongside a big red flag, you started yelling 'Abandon ship!' at the top of your lungs and pushed Limford and me overboard then jumped in after us and we had to swim all the way to the shore."

"Yep, we gave them the slip alright. Blumenfelds - 1, long arm of the law - 0," Limford grins.

"And the worst part of it all was that right before you pushed me into that filthy and polluted water where we might have easily drowned or been hacked to pieces by the ship's rotors, I'd only just noticed a voicemail from Amir and was getting ready to open it. But that doesn't make any difference now that my phone got lost at sea, does it?"

"Aww, chill out Jakey, we'll get you reunited with your better half soon enough," Limford coos.

"Amir is not my better half!" Jake sputters. "He's not my 'half' anything. And don't call me 'Jakey'."

"Whatever you say, oh, great pharaoh of the Nile," Limford waves him off.

"What is that supposed to mean?" Jake bristles.

"Come on, we gotta go," Limford shoves him out of their hiding place. "Looks like Leron scored us a ride."

Sure enough, Jake can see Leron behind the wheel of a beat up Dodge, waiting for them on the other side of the fence, and how did the idiot even get there so fast? He was right beside Jake a minute ago.

"Did he just steal that car?" Jake asks while trying his best to climb over the fence in his wet clothes. Not one of his most graceful moments, to be honest.

"Do you really want to know that? Really?" Limford jumps over deftly to the other side like a fricking ninja monkey or something and grins at Jake's less than stellar attempts to do the same. Stupid Blumenfelds.

"Well, at least when this is over, I'm not gonna be the one doing time," Jake decides to look on the bright side of this whole bodyswitching business.

And then his jeans get caught in the barb wire over the fence and Jake falls face first into the ground.

***

Amir and the gang are barely ten paces out the police station door, when a dark green van with the Scooby Doo logo poorly graffitied on the side screeches to a halt in front of them. 

"What the..." Amir's eyes immediately zoom in on a painted image of Velma flashing a pair of double dees from under her orange blouse on the left side of the logo and another image of Shaggy trying to unlock the Chest of Demons with his massive boner, on the right. Genius.

The back doors suddenly burst open then and five guys with black balaclavas over their faces jump out, grab them and without any further ado, start hauling their asses towards the van.

"Help!" Amir squeaks as he feels himself being shoved into the back of the van. The cop Amir just blackmailed for his phone call looks back at him through one of the police building windows and slowly flips him the bird with a sneer. And then the doors slam shut behind them.

"What the fuck are you doing?" Steve tries to get back to the doors, but the masked guys push him back and the van peels out onto the road.

Oh, shitballs, Amir thinks. He's seen Charlie the Unicorn enough times to know he's gonna end up one kidney short by the time they're done with him. His best chance would be to grab the guy nearest to him, bite into his neck to create a diversion and then jump out of the moving van. But before he has a chance to put his brilliant plan in motion, one of the guys pulls off his mask and yells:

"You just got punked, bitches!"

"Joe?" Chris blinks at him, mouth agape. "What the fuck, man? I was this close to shitting my pants right now!"

The other guys take off their masks as well and start laughing and high-fiving each other on a job well done. Come to think of it, they all look kind of familiar.

"Dude, you should've seen your faces," one of them cracks up.

"What do you think of my new ride?" the guy called Joe spreads his arms wide to encompass the interior of the van. 

Amir can see an unmade cot off to one side, wall to wall Austin Powers carpeting all around, a couple of beer kegs and a very impressive array of bongs on a makeshift shelf over his head.

"Whoa, you guys bought yourselves a Bang Bus?" Chris asks.

"Nah, I should be so lucky," Joe waves him off. "This is my new house on wheels, dude."

"You've already got a house, dude," Steve squints at him. "And a car."

"Remember that backpacking through Europe trip I always wanted to take?" Joe explains. "Well, I said to myself, fuck the hitchhiking and fuck the rat infested hostels, I'm gonna go out in style. So I bought this baby last week, tuned it up, did the paintjob myself, and was saving it for the big trip until I heard what you guys did tonight."

"Celebrities, bitch, that's what we are," Jim pumps his chest out.

"You are a hero among men, Jake, I swear to God," Joe slaps a hand on Amir's shoulder, jolting his bruised ribs. "We saw the video of the fight on Youtube, you were kicking major ass."

"Youtube? Seriously?" Amir frowns. Jake is gonna flip his shiatsu for real if he sees that.

"Yeah, man," one of the wannabe kidnappers pipes in. "Some chick filmed the whole thing on her phone and posted it online. The whole town's seen it by now."

"My favorite part is when you smash that chair over McGuinness' head and three of his teeth fall out," another one of the guys says.

"You know how long I've wanted to do that, man?" Joe asks. "You're fucking awesome! We live together, we die together, until the day we die, baby!"

Oh, right, Amir remembers. _That_ Joe, the one Jake was talking to on the phone that one time at the office. Great, more of Jake's beloved high school buddies. And speaking of high...

"Dude, get a load of this shit," Joe pushes a bong under Amir's nose.

"Nah, man, they gave me some stuff back at the hospital, I think I'm gonna pass," Amir tries to scoot away.

"Bullshit!" Joe drags him back. "You're the man of the hour. You did something important tonight, Jake. You brought down a reign of terror and did what neither of us ever had the cojones to do: you stood up for yourself and you won. You gave all of us our courage and dignity back and wiped the slate clean on all the bullying and the humiliation we've had to suffer because of those jerks for years. So tonight, Jake, we're celebrating you, because you deserve it. So stop being a bitch and smoke some fucking weed!"

"Ah, well, when you put it that way..." Amir finally relents and takes a long puff out of the bong.

"Yeah! That's what I'm talking about!" Joe claps him on the back.

"Whoa, dude, easy on the ribs!" Amir coughs out the smoke.

"Where are we going?" Steve asks.

"Me and the guys are throwing a party at the Tree House," Joe answers. "The whole gang's already there. And guess who else is coming!" he turns to Amir.

"Who?"

"Julia fucking Sheppard, man!" Joe smiles proudly.

"Who?" Amir repeats.

"Man, that shit they gave you at the hospital must've really scrambled your brains," Joe sputters. "Julia Sheppard? Captain of the cheerleading squad? You drooled over her all the way through high school? And when she moved to New York you kept stalking her at that Starbucks she works at but never had the balls to ask her out? Well guess what. It just so happens that she's in town visiting her folks, she heard about your performance tonight and wants to see you, tell you in person how awesome you are. You get my drift?"

"Oh, yeah, now I get it," Amir nods. 

"'Bout time," Joe snorts.

"Holy shit dude, you're finally gonna score!" Jim yells.

"My boy's getting his dick spanked tonight!" Chris agrees.

"I don't know, man, I don't think that's a good idea," Amir tries to get out of the deal somewhat gracefully. He doesn't really feel like chatting up some girl that Jake's apparently head over hills for, pretending to have a good time with these complete strangers who think he's somebody he's not. Jake's going to get here soon enough, after he listens to that voicemail, and he's going to be pissed. Amir doesn't want to add more to that by screwing up his chances with the girl of his dreams. No matter how empty it makes him feel inside, to know that he will never get to touch that light he's been striving towards for the past five years, above all he just wants Jake to be happy.

"Don't go chickenshit on me now, man," Joe replies. "I'm gonna get you to cannonball that fiddle cove tonight if it's the last thing I do."

"Come on, man, you've been pining for that piece of ass for years," Chris insists. "And now she's the one making the first move. This is your chance."

"And we're not letting you weasel you way out of it like a pussy. Tonight, you're getting laid, whether you like it or not," one of the other guys decrees.

"So, what, you're just gonna drag me there and hog tie me to this chick's bed?" Amir snorts.

"Consider yourself kidnapped, man," Joe nods contentedly. "Cause there's no way you're getting out of this car."

And he promptly flicks a switch on his key chain, locking all the doors of the van. Shit.

"Here, have some more weed," he passes the bong off to Amir again. "That'll grow you some new balls for sure."

And this is going to be a long night, Amir sighs.

***

"There, that's it! Pull over!" Jake spots his parents' house on the left side of the street. He's two seconds away from passing out with relief. They made it. They're finally here.

Leron yanks on the steering wheel of his piece of shit stolen car towards the driveway. Just a few more seconds, and this nightmare day from hell will be over...

Just then, something big crashes right into the tail end of their car with a deafening bang and sends Jake nose first into the windshield. He has a fraction of a second to think 'this fucking figures' as they spin around two times with a screech of rubber on tarmac until the shitty Dodge finally sputters to a halt on his parents' front lawn.

"What the fucking fuck!" Leron unclenches his fists from the steering wheel and gapes at Jake's mom's rosebushes they just plowed through.

"Is everyone still alive?" Limford untangles himself from between the seats, rubbing at his bruised forehead.

Jake turns his head around and sees a convertible Chevy now parked all prim and proper a few feet behind them on the street, three crackhead douchebags stacked over the seats with whiskey bottles in their hands and music blaring from their stereo and how the fuck didn't they even get a scratch on their paintjob when Leron's Dodge looks like it just went ten rounds with a monster truck and lost? How is that even fair?

"I'm going to fucking _end_ these motherfuckers!" Leron grits his teeth and kicks the driver's side door right off its hinges.

"Yay to the fucking nay, brotha’," Limford jumps out of the car after him.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing?" Jake hears Limford's voice booming somewhere behind him, followed by a more subdued apology from what must be the other driver. 

Jake carefully presses his fingers against his nose and his hand comes back bloody. Shit, that fucking hurts. And he's still feeling a bit dizzy from the shock. Fuck, he almost died. Again. Why the hell did he have to jinx it? Why? Why does this keep happening to him?

Oh, shit. He stops and stares at his front porch. His mom and dad are coming out of the house. It just keeps getting better and better.

"My rosebuds!" Laura exclaims, hands over her mouth.

Behind him, he can hear Leron and Limford gearing up for a fight. 

_'Alright, time for some damage control.'_

He pushes the door open and carefully steps out, stumbling a bit and feeling queasy when the ground starts spinning under his feet.

"Oh my God! Amir?" Laura hurries down the steps and manages to catch him before he falls.

"Hi, mom," he gives her a half bloody grin from under his broken glasses.

"Are you alright? What happened?" Laura props him up on the hood of the car and looks him over worriedly. "Why are your clothes wet?" she asks after a pause.

"I'm calling the police," Samuel Hurwitz takes out his phone.

"No, no, don't do that!" Jake lunges for the phone, but misses by a mile and falls back against the car. The last thing they need right now is to get busted for crashing a stolen car.

"Just calm down, honey," Laura soothes him. "We'll get you to a hospital in no time."

"No, I need to find A... Jake," he tries to stand again on legs that feel like slippery noodles. Damn, that windshield was hard. "Where's Jake?"

"Jake's gone out with some friends," Laura helps him stand. "You'll see him when he gets back. Now try to relax, the police will sort everything out."

And by the looks of it, his father is reporting the accident as they speak. Shit, he needs to get out of here and find Amir. At least now he knows the idiot isn't lying dead in a ditch somewhere. He's out in town with Jake's friends, probably making an ass of himself, but still, safe. What's the worst thing that could happen to him with Jake's friends?

"Hey, _'cuz_ ', come check this out!" Limford yells at Jake and beckons him over.

"I gotta go," Jake bats his mom's hands away and starts limping towards the pristine Chevy where the Blumenfelds and the three drunken dudes have apparently reached some kind of stalemate and are all hunched over a computer tablet.

"Wait a second, Amir," Laura tries to stop him, but gets distracted by the sight of her ruined rosebushes and falls behind.

"Dude, the cops are on their way," Jake whispers to Limford. "We gotta get out of here."

"Nah, man, you gotta see this first," he yanks the tablet from the drunk driver's hand and pushes it under Jake's nose, just in time for Jake to see his own body smashing a wooden chair into Robbie McGuinness's head on a Youtube feed. 

"Whoa!" Jake gapes at the screen. He watches 'himself' and three of his high school buddies beat the crap out of Robbie's gang right up until the police burst through the doors and the video feed gets cut off.

So this is what Amir's been up to with Jake's body - starting bar fights and getting thrown in jail. No wonder he wasn't picking up his phone. And all the while Jake was out of his mind worrying about the fucking asshole and bending head over backwards trying to get to him. 

"What the hell? When did this happen?" Jake shakes his head in disbelief and almost pukes from the dizziness again. If he gets his hands on Amir, he's going to kill him, he really is.

"That's what I was telling you, this badass dude here, Jake Hurwitz, kicked those guy's asses tonight and now he's like a town hero or something," the drunk driver explains. "He just got sprung out of jail half an hour ago and he's throwing a major party up town, that's where we were heading when-"

"When you fucking plowed into my car like an asshole," Leron interrupts.

"I'm sorry, man, but you should've signaled if you wanted to change lanes, that wasn't my fault-" the guy replies.

"And you should've been watching the fucking road, dickwad," Limford gets amped up again.

"Hey, hey, guys, cool it," Jake steps in. He can already hear police sirens a couple of blocks away. "You said you were on your way to this party, right?"

"Yeeah," one of them answers.

"Give us a ride there and we won't press any charges, how does that sound?" Jake tells them.

"I don't know, man, if the cops catch us fleeing the scene-" 

"Look, _'man'_ , I need to get to that party right the fuck now," Jake snaps. "So you can either give us a ride, or stay here and get arrested. It's your choice."

"Alright then, let's roll," the guy finally agrees.

"Amir, wait! Where are you going? You need to go to a hospital!" Laura catches up to them as they're climbing into the car.

"Don't worry, I'm going to find Jake," he answers, as he squeezes himself in the back seat next to Limford and Leron. "Hey, Laura, do me a favor, please, and don't tell the cops these guys crashed our car. We came to an agreement on our own, and there's no need for them to go to jail over this, alright?"

"Well, I'll have to get Sam to go along with it," she relents. "But you still need to see a doctor, Amir, your nose is bleeding and you can barely stand on your feet!"

"I've had worse, don’t worry," Jake shrugs it off as the Chevy revs up. "And, Laura. Thanks."

Then, with a last look at the crumpled carcass of the busted Dodge, they peel out down the street.

***

There are so many stars up in the sky. Like all the dreams mankind has ever dreamed, pinned up on a blackboard for everyone to see. He could throw darts at them. Who knows, maybe one of these days he'll actually pin one down and take it for himself. That's what his grandmother used to tell him every night before he went to bed, back when everything was still magical and pure - to always reach for the sky. How long has it been since he last looked upwards rather than at the ground beneath his feet?

He blows out a perfect circle of smoke. It floats away towards the sky, caressing the constellations and then it vanishes in the warm summer breeze. He feels mellow and at peace here on the roof, where nobody can see him and the voices of the others are just distant echoes from far away.

"Jake?" a woman's voice calls out to him. For a second it doesn't even register. And then, again: "Jake. What are you doing up here, silly?"

He turns his head lazily around and sees the blonde busty chick, Julia, climb up onto the roof next to him. He's been trying to avoid her ever since he got here, and this whole tree house thing isn't really sturdy enough to support both their weight on the roof, but it looks like Amir's shit out of luck this time. Unless he jumps. 

"So this is where you ran off to," Julia bumps him on the shoulder playfully. "If I didn't know better, I'd say you were trying to get rid of me."

"Things were getting a bit too loud down there," Amir mutters. Which is kind of an understatement if he looks at the thirty or so people drunk off their asses laughing and flirting with each other downstairs, around the campfire or up inside the Tree House itself. And there are even more coming every minute. 

"Hey, pass me that thing, will you?" she gestures towards Amir's joint.

He gives it over lazily, and the girl takes a long drag of smoke, holds it in for a few seconds, then blows it out with a wink.

"You know, you're not like all the other guys, Jake," she spreads herself on the wooden boards next to where he's lying, head propped up on one arm. Haloed by the starry sky like this, she looks like some kind of moon goddess bestowing her favor upon him. He should be grateful, he knows he should. But still, it doesn't feel quite right. It never does.

"You like to keep to yourself," she says. "And you like to look up at the sky. You've got the heart of a poet."

Amir sniffs out a chuckle.

"You wouldn't say that if you read any of my poems." Especially the ones he writes on scrolls.

"So I was right," she smiles at his admission. "Don't worry, I'm not going to tell a soul. Wouldn't want to ruin that bad boy rep you earned tonight."

She holds out the makeshift cigarette to his lips, and Amir takes another long drag for himself.

"I've got a little confession to make," she lets her hand settle on Amir's chest, still holding the joint between her fingers. "I used to have a bit of a crush on you during senior year."

"Really?" he looks at her. Then why didn't Jake ever...

"But every time I wanted to talk, you would run in the opposite direction. Kind of like you're doing tonight," she smirks. 

And that answers his question right there.

"I think we've played this game of chicken long enough, don't you? You're a nice guy, Jake, and I'm willing to give this a shot if you want it too. What do you say?"

And for the life of him, Amir can't think of anything to say to that. Maybe he should have jumped off the roof when he had the chance.

And apparently Julia takes his silence as a 'yes', because she leans slowly forward for a kiss. A kiss which stumbles and lands on his cheek when Amir turns his head away at the last second, heart hammering in his chest.

"I'm sorry," he begs her with his eyes when she pulls back and stares at him in wonder. "You're an amazing girl, Julia, and I'd be one lucky bastard to have you in my life, but... I just can't," he finishes lamely.

She keeps staring at him for a few more seconds, and then she finally pulls back and leans on her elbow.

"So what's her name?" she asks with a lopsided smile as she takes another drag out of the cigarette.

"Whose name?" Amir blinks confusedly.

"The girl you're obviously head over heels in love with, of course."

And thank God for the whole lack of light, because Amir can feel his cheeks heat up at her remark. He is so hopelessly, thoroughly fucked. 

"What makes you think there's someone else?" he tries to deflect.

"Oh, come on, Jake, even I wouldn't turn these boobies down if I were in your place," she waves a hand towards her cleavage with an amused smile. "So? Who is she?"

"It doesn't matter," he lets his eyes drift to the side. "Nothing's gonna come out of it anyway."

"If you're so sure of that, then why did you choose not to kiss me right now?"

And, damn, this girl is so much smarter than she looks. Amir is probably the stupidest fucker on the face of the planet for walking away from this chance.

"I still have hope," he finally admits. No matter how hard he's tried, he never did manage to kill that last glimmer of hope. And it will be the death of him, but he can't find it in himself to care. 

"Aww, cheer up, Hurwitz," she bumps her knee against his. "These things have a way of surprising you when you least expect them. It'll all work out in the end."

"I think I need a hug," Amir sniffs miserably at the sky. Any more of this and he's gonna start crying like a baby, he just knows.

And then, surprisingly enough, Julia wraps her arms around him and holds him tight as they finish the last half of the joint in silence, looking at the stars.

***

"Hey, JWitz, where do you think you're going?" Joe intercepts him as he's getting ready to bolt.

"Just walking Julia back to her car," Amir puts an arm around the blonde's shoulders with a smile.

"Ah, yeah, gotcha," Joe nods in understanding. "Now that's what I'm talking about." 

And with a not so stealthy wink, he turns back to his group of friends around the fire. 

"Dodged a bullet there," Julia giggles and drags him away from the clearing into the woods.

This place is really something, Amir has to admit. Right on the outskirts of town, in the middle of the forest, the Tree House was apparently built forty years ago by Joe's dad and his friends to have a private spot where they could get drunk and hook up with girls, then over time, it became the ultimate partying Mecca for all the teenagers in the area. Unfortunately for Amir, it's remote enough that he'd have trouble getting back into town without a car if it weren't for Julia's kind offer to give him a lift.

"You know everyone's expecting us to fuck like bunnies right about now," Julia says.

"I still can't believe how chill you're being about all of this," Amir shakes his head.

"Hey, don't worry about it," she shrugs as she makes her way through the trees. "After all the douchebags I've had to deal with all my life, it's kind of refreshing to meet a guy like you. Who said chivalry was dead, right?"

If Amir could choose any word to describe his past interactions with girls, chivalry certainly wouldn't make the list. Pink-eye would be infinitely more accurate. 

"Either way, thank you, for everything," Amir says as they reach the side of the road where all the other cars, including Joe's Scooby van, are parked. 

He carefully steps around the beer bottles and other junk littering the ground from previous parties and stops in front of Julia's red Honda.

"You know, if things don't pan out with that girl of yours, you can always give me a call," Julia says, half jokingly, taking a step closer and stopping in front of him.

"I'll keep that in mind," he tells her, suddenly aware of how close she's standing, how she seems to be leaning towards him with more than obvious intent.

She lays one hand delicately on his arm and, never breaking eye contact, whispers to him:

"One for the road?"

Then, oh so slowly, she closes the distance between them and Amir can't move, can't blink, can almost feel her lips touching him, when...

"Hey!" a voice suddenly shouts out and he can hear a car screech to a halt behind them.

His stomach does a double flip right then, because he knows that voice, he knows his own voice, he knows what that means... 

He's almost afraid to turn around, but when he does, he has the oddest feeling of disconnect as he watches his own body jump out of a convertible car, looking like he got half digested by a giant squid, quickly followed by - what the hell? - Leron and Limford, and a bunch of other guys he doesn't know.

"Get away from her!" his mirror image growls, low and barely restrained, and, yeah, of course, Amir's heart sinks. Of course Jake wouldn't want to see him cozying up to the girl of his dreams, the one he's been pining over for who knows how many years.

Oh, crap, now Jake is coming right at them and Amir never knew his own face could look so scary. He's definitely going to get his ass kicked tonight. 

But then, out of the blue, Jake steps on an empty beer bottle, slips and crash-lands on his back with a thud. Everyone else just stops and stares at him in shock.

"Owww," he moans painfully, arms and legs akimbo on the grass.

That sound finally spurs Amir into action, and he quickly closes the distance to where Jake is lying on the ground.

"Jake! Are you okay?" Amir stumbles to his knees beside him.

He quickly takes in the wet and muddy clothes, the broken glasses, the bloody scrapes on Jake's face. What the hell happened? Who did this to him? 

And then Jake blinks slowly, like coming out of a daze, and looks up at him. 

And Amir suddenly has a hard time remembering how to breathe. Because it's nothing like he imagined, nothing like looking into a mirror, it's just like seeing that light for the first time all over again, because it's Jake, it's him behind those eyes, unmistakable and unchanged, and, yeah, it's only been a day, but, fuck, Amir missed seeing those eyes, missed seeing the man behind them watch him back.

"I fell," Jake whispers with Amir's voice, not blinking, just looking up at him with this strange, almost awed expression on his face that Amir's never seen before.

"Yeah, you did," Amir smiles down at him, and for the first time since he woke up that morning on the side of the road, the universe starts making sense again.

"Yeah," Jake smiles then too, and it's one of the most beautiful things Amir's ever seen. He could spend every second of every day staring into that smile. It's as close to the sky as he's ever going to get.

"Ahem!" Julia clears her throat somewhere to the right. "What the hell is going on here?"

"Hey, baby," Leron sidles up to her with a big, sleazy grin. "I see you got some car keys over there," he nods to her hand. "Wanna take me for a ride?"

"Eww, get away from me," she scrunches up her nose in disgust. "You smell like a sewer rat. Jake!"

"Come on, babe, you know I'll get down and dirty with you anytime," he makes a move on her, but she quickly ducks to the side.

"Need some help?" Amir ignores everything around him except for Jake.

"Yeah, I think I'm still a bit concussed from the car crash," Jake answers. "And falling off that fence. And Limford sucker punching me. And headbutting your bathroom door."

"Nah, you're gonna be fine," Amir helps him sit up from the ground. "I actually got concussed earlier tonight, and I'm doing great."

"Yeah, saw it on the Internet by the way," Jake climbs to his feet, leaning heavily on Amir's side. "I should be seriously kicking your ass for that."

"Aah, please don't!" Amir pulls back a step.

"Hey, where are you going?" Jake loses his balance and almost kisses the pavement again. "Come back!"

Amir catches him by the elbows and steadies him on his feet.

"Awww," Limford coos at them from his perch on the hood of a car, while Julia is still trying to fend off Leron's lame-ass and frankly disturbing pick up techniques.

"Hey, guys, what's going on?" Steve and Chris tumble out of the woods, with bottles of booze dangling from their hands. 

"Shit, what is _he_ doing here?" Chris does a double take when he spots Jake.

"Help!" Julia squeaks and hides behind Steve to get away from Leron.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" Steve puffs out his chest, glad to be of assistance to the busty blonde, and shoves Leron back. "The lady said no, asshole, so fuck off!"

One of the three guys from the convertible looks mournfully at his empty bottle of Jack and decrees: "Man, I'm way too sober for this shit," then takes off in the direction of the Tree House without looking back.

Just then, a police car appears from around the bend, lights flashing and for all intents and purposes, heading their way.

"That's our cue," the driver of the convertible rears up. "Nice meeting you guys, hope I never see you again, yada, yada. Gotta run." 

And he makes himself scarce with his other buddy in the blink of an eye.

The police car skids to a halt in front of them and Amir is surprised to see none other than the same cops who busted them at the bar earlier tonight.

"Oh, it's you guys, why am I not surprised?" Cop Number One throws a disdainful glance at Amir, Steve and Chris.

"Officer, I can explain-" Chris tries and fails poorly to hide the whiskey bottle behind his back.

"Much as I'd like to throw your sorry asses back in jail, I've currently got bigger fish to fry," the cop walks past him and stops in front of Jake.

"Amir Blumenfeld?" he asks.

"Yeeah?" Jake throws a questioning glance Amir's way.

And then the cop grabs him by the scruff of his shirt, throws him onto the hood of the patrol car and cuffs his hands behind his back.

"Amir Blumenfeld, you are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent, anything you say can..."

Meanwhile, Leron and Limford are getting the same treatment from Cop Number Two a few feet to the left.

"Holy shit!" Chris looks at the entire scene with a drunken grin on his face.

"Serves you right, asshole," Julia kicks Leron in the shin as Cop Number Two shoves him in the back of the patrol car next to his cousin Limford.

"Hey, wait a minute!" Amir jumps into the fray. "What's this all about? Why are you arresting them?"

"These three men are wanted for questioning in relation to a case of property damage at a gas station in New York and a stolen vehicle from the Nantucket Port area, the very same vehicle that was involved in an accident forty-five minutes ago," the cop answers. "Actually, this should be of interest to you too, since the person who reported the accident was one Samuel Hurwitz. Your father, I presume?"

"Seriously?" Amir looks at Jake askance. "And you were busting my chops for one teeny tiny bar fight?"

"Now's really not the time, _'Jake'_ ," Jake tells him through gritted teeth as the cop yanks him towards the back of the car.

"Whoa, wait a second, I wanna come with," he follows them. He'll be damned if he lets himself get separated from Jake again.

"You were just released from prison two hours ago, and now you want to come back?" Cop Number Two blocks his way. "Get lost, Hurwitz."

"I've been smoking drugs!" Amir tries another tack. "That's right, at least half a bag of that Columbian crack, right down my gullet. I'm a dangerous criminal, officer, arrest me!"

"You're not going back to jail you fucking psycho," Cop Number Two snaps. "Now get out of my way."

"Oh, really?" Amir sneers, then balls up his right fist and swiftly aims a punch at the cop's face.

And just as swiftly, the cop raises a hand and catches Amir's fist in his palm, blocking the punch and then squeezing his fingers in a death grip.

"Yeah, really," the cop gives him a smug grin.

And then Amir kicks him in the nuts. And this time, he doesn't miss.

"Whoa! Jackpot!" Chris cheers him from the sidelines.

The cop doubles forward with his hands around his dick, eyes bulging out and wheezing:

"Motherfucker! I'm gonna kill you!"

"Told you I was dangerous, bitch!" Amir grins at him cheekily.

"Alright, Hurwitz, you got your wish, you're under arrest!" Cop Number One slaps a pair of handcuffs around his wrists and shoves him with a bit more force than necessary in the back of the car, before he goes back to help his momentarily castrated partner up.

"Way to grow balls overnight, 'cuz!" Limford smirks at him as they cram themselves on the backseat of the patrol car like sardines in a can.

"Like I was gonna let you fuckers have all the fun," Amir beams proudly. From the window of the car, he can see Steve pocketing his iPhone stealthily, and if his guess is right, five minutes from now this second video is going to become even more viral on Youtube than the first. Feels good to be a hero, yeah, it does.

Jake just watches him with that exasperated, bitchy look he pulls off so well even wearing someone else's face, and Amir feels his heart swell in his chest.

All is right in the world.

***

So he's in jail. Well. Jake can't say he never saw it coming. Being in Amir's immediate vicinity tends to have unexpected if not catastrophic consequences most of the time. Jake would normally be pissed off right about now, he would rant, point fingers and swear for the umpteenth time that he'll cut Amir out of his life for good. But, somehow, all Jake feels right now is tired. Tired of lying to himself, tired of running so damn hard just to get dragged back into the same orbit he never wanted to escape in the first place. Tired of letting his own insecurities dictate his life, tired of being too afraid to admit...

He chances a look to his left. Amir is sitting on the bench next to him, leaning his head against the concrete wall, looking straight ahead, and how strange it is that Jake can still see his friend under that new face, his own face no less, and how reckless it is that, even though he has no idea how to get them back into their own bodies, Jake feels so utterly calm right now, because switch or no switch, he knows he's right where he is supposed to be.

He looks down at his hands, Amir's hands, and lets himself remember that morning, in the shower, how those hands felt on his skin, how that skin felt under his fingers, how he allowed his mind to shut off for a minute and just feel, how afraid he was right after because admitting even part of that meant he'd have to admit the whole truth to himself, and he wasn't ready for it, he'd never felt ready to let go like that.

So Jake did what he usually does, he got mad, he got distracted, he even got jealous when he saw Amir almost kiss that girl tonight, jealous like he'd got with Hallie, or Leronna, or every other girl that Amir had ever been close to, except his jealousy wasn't born out of pride, out of envy for his friend's success like he tried to fool himself into believing. Jake's always known it was something more than that, something rooted deep inside of him that coils like barb wire and makes his blood boil every time Amir turns his eyes away from him to look at somebody else. Because those eyes are meant for him, goddammit, those eyes and that obsession and the man himself, with every fault he's got and every quality, with all his insanity and his hidden depths. And, fuck it all, Jake wants him. Has wanted him for so long without even realizing it, like the missing piece of a puzzle that would make him complete. Wants him so much it scares him half to death, because he's never wanted a man before, never even considered it, doesn't have the faintest clue what that means or if it could ever work. His life so far has been a string of short and meaningless relationships, never getting truly attached to anyone, never daring to let anyone get close enough to see him for who he really is, so this is foreign territory for him, anything could happen, and the likelihood of him getting burned makes him want to run back to his previous oblivion and hide.

But the scariest thing of all would be to never even try.

So he turns his head again, catches the tail end of a furtive look Amir's not able to hide in time. But that's alright, Jake already knew he was being watched, he always knows when those eyes are fixed on him like laser beams that can see through to his very bones. Now, for the first time ever, Jake lets himself look back.

"Hey," Jake breaks the silence.

"Hey," Amir answers, uncharacteristically quiet, looking up for a second and then down at his hands again, biting his lip nervously. He can't seem to be able to look Jake in the eye. Come to think of it, he's barely said a word since they arrived at the police station, and that is more than strange, considering the stunt he pulled with the cops earlier.

"Nothing happened, you know," Amir says haltingly. At Jake's uncomprehending silence, he goes on: "With Julia, I mean. Nothing happened. I wouldn't do that to you, so..." then he trails off, fiddling with a frayed thread at the hem of his jeans. "Don't be mad at me."

And Jake gets it now. Amir thinks Jake's upset at him for stealing his girl and feeling guilty about the whole thing, which is so far from what the actual deal is Jake almost starts to laugh. But it kind of tugs at his heart a little, too, because he himself didn't even hesitate to steal Leronna away from Amir, didn't want to look at it too closely then, he just knew he needed to break them apart. Whether Jake would end up with Leronna or not didn't make much difference to him at the time, all he wanted was to get her away from Amir for his own twisted, selfish reasons. If he'd only been more honest with himself, maybe Leronna would still be alive today.

"I'm not mad," he tells him.

"It wasn't even my idea in the first place," Amir staggers on without hearing him. "Joe and his buddies kidnapped me from the police station in a van and dragged me to that party and then she kept throwing herself at me- But only because she thought I was you! She said she has a crush on you, so you can definitely ask her out and she'll say yes-"

"Amir!" he grabs the other man's arm and finally puts an end to his rant. "Relax, I'm not mad at you."

"Oh," Amir looks at him, half relieved and half confused, but at least he's making eye contact this time, so Jake's going to count it as a win.

"I'm not going to ask her out," he clarifies.

"What? But why? I thought-" Amir gears himself up for another round of babbling, so Jake cuts him off before he even begins.

"Just, hold up for a minute, okay?" 

And he's scared shitless, because this is it, sink or swim, the moment of truth. And he doesn't have the faintest clue what to say. Amir is looking back at him with a frown on his face, a frown on _Jake's_ face, and how fucked up is it that Jake doesn't give a damn about that? How fucked up is it that all he can think about is grabbing on to this man in front of and never letting go?

"Feel free to punch me in the face if you want, but I need to ask you a question," Jake says.

"What is it?" Amir looks at him with a deer-in-the-headlights expression on his face, clearly waiting for something bad to happen, expecting the worst as he usually does, because Jake's been treating him like shit for all these years and taking out his own insecurities on him so why should he expect anything different and, God, what an asshole he's been, if he ruins things between them with this and Amir decides to kick him to the curb, it's no less than he deserves.

This has to end now, one way or another, he can't stand to see that scared, self-deprecating look on Amir's face anymore, knowing he's the one who put it there.

So Jake leans forward and kisses him. 

Amir sucks in a shocked breath and instinctively flinches back, but Jake lifts up a hand and gently cups his cheek, anchoring him in place but still leaving him the option to pull away if he wants. Then he closes his eyes and lets his lips drag across the other man's, tentatively, trying to imprint the sensation into his own mind, his heart beating right out of his chest with fear and excitement, and when Amir parts his mouth in a barely audible gasp, he pulls first his upper lip, then his lower in between his own, kissing them gently, feeling the other man's warm breath tickling his cheek.

When he pulls away after a few seconds, Jake feels lightheaded and high strung like a live wire at the same time, and Amir's looking back at him with his eyes wide open and cheeks a bit flushed, like the world has just spun right off its axis and he doesn't know what to do.

"Oh," Amir whispers and lifts up a hand to touch his lips. 

And he just stays like that, frozen and unblinking, watching him, and Jake can't read him, can't read his own face anymore, and, oh God, what if he made a mistake? What if their friendship is over now? Why the hell did he do it out of the blue like that, when he should have waited, tested the grounds, made some kind of plan... Oh, shit, he can't breathe, he's gonna have a fucking heart attack and Amir is just staring at him, not saying anything...

And then, without any warning, Amir lunges forward and smashes his mouth against his, and Jake's brain short-circuits somewhere along the way because it tastes like blood and passion and joy, it hurts and it tingles and it undoes him to the very core. Holy shit, where did Amir learn to fucking kiss like that, with his whole body and soul, with hands digging into Jake's shoulder and neck and straining against him like he wants to crawl under his skin? Jake grabs at every limb he can get his hands on and just lets himself go, like a drowning man sinking deeper and deeper down, and he never wants this to end. This is it. He could die right now and he wouldn't even care.

Somehow, maybe seconds, maybe eons later, they tear apart from each other, panting and feeling a little bruised from the brutality of the kiss, and it takes a while for Jake to realize that he's no longer looking at blue eyes. He lifts up a hand unsteadily and touches Amir's face, runs the tips of his fingers over the dark stubble that turns him on so much - and he's never letting Amir shave, ever again - over his lips, the tip of his nose and across his forehead, mapping out the contours of his face in awe.

And then he smiles wider and happier than he has ever been, and sees the same elation mirrored in Amir's dark eyes.

"Well, I'll be damned!" he chokes out.

"Shut up," Amir grins and tackles him onto the hard prison bench.

"Fuck, my ribs!" Jake squeaks, and, seriously, what did Amir do to his body anyway?

But he forgets that thought as soon as Amir's lips are on him again, and fuck it, he doesn't need to know how he broke his ribs, or how they got switched back to their own bodies or even what tomorrow may bring. He's got everything he needs right here in his arms, all bony ridges and warmth and hunger for more, for everything he has to give, and dammit, Jake will give him everything he's got.

"Ahem, you guys know that we're still here, right?" a voice interrupts them, and Jake lets his head fall back onto the bench to glare upside down at Leron and Limford through the bars of the next cell.

"Go fuck yourself, Limford," Amir snorts a laugh and lets his head fall on Jake's chest.

"I just might if you keep up the free show," Limford replies.

"Oh yeah? Then I just 'might' let slip about that little incident in New Orleans with the goat and the three ducks-" Amir threatens.

"Okay, okay, no need for drastic measures," Limford hurries up to deflect.

"What goat?" Leron pipes up curiously.

And Jake just has to laugh at that, because the balance of the universe has been restored. He laughs and squeezes his arms around the man lying on top of him, and even though his ribs may hurt like hell right now, he knows he's never gonna let go, no matter what. This is where he belongs.

***

The guy who never manages to remember his name when asked is standing on a sidewalk across the street from the Nantucket Police Station, watching the building with a knowing smile on his face. He's wearing an ill-fitting Gandalf Halloween costume and his fake beard is really starting to itch. Still, he pumps out his chest with a feeling of accomplishment, not in the least diminished by the fact that he's currently going commando under that robe and his balls are pretty much applauding each other in the wind.

He pulls out a wrinkled piece of paper from his warlock satchel and holds it up to the dim morning light.

Dating coach  
Couples therapist  
Private eye  
Office painter

Blah blah blah, he skips ahead... there it is!

Wizard

He crosses that off too, with a straight line, then pockets the list once again. He doubts he'll need it anymore; his job here is done. It's taken five years and a whole lot of work to bring these two idiots together, and he's almost sorry to leave now, he's sure gonna miss them. But still, you never know. These two can be really stupid sometimes, and his services might be needed again. Better keep the list, then.

With a last look at the police station and a pleased sigh, the man who never comes up with a straightforward name when asked lifts up his magic wand, twirls it around three times clockwise and two times counterclockwise and then, in the blink of an eye, winks out of existence as if he was never there.

Further down the street, dawn breaks, heralding a brand new day and painting all the windows gold. And life goes on.

THE END


End file.
